Sooo Not Funny
Sep 1st, 2009 by garyrichards
This borders on the obvious, but it nevertheless struck me forcefully coming straight from today’s humor classes (ENGL 375XX: American Humor) and returning to the last half of the 1855 “Song of Myself” to finish for tonight: there is not a shred of humor in Whitman here. Both in the poem and in the preface, there’s an insistant earnestness that is often inspiring (I still love “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs …” [50-52] for all my earlier critique of the frontispiece), but this earnestness risks becoming tiresome. Even in the depicted play of the twenty-eight bathers, there’s a somber eroticism. I’ve found myself suddenly nostalgic for, say, the puns of Walden. Or are there humorous moments here, and I’m merely not detecting them? I’m not suggesting that humor be a requisite element for all texts, but in one devoted to a performative survey of so many types of differences, it seems an odd absence. Professor Scanlon rightly charges me always to consider audience, and clearly Whitman aims here at a serious one to relay a serious message, but does the text have to go to this extreme?
Oh, you are SERIOUSLY underestimating the visual comedy of being “stucco’d with quadrapeds and birds all over,” are you not?
I only find it funny when I think of Hard Times, poor Sissy Jupe, and the horses on the wallpaper. Now there was a humorous moment!
You guys are nerds.
When “the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of” you, I guess you’re expected to laugh backwards.
Oh, Allison, you have no idea. Well, maybe an inkling of an idea.